Paranormal After Dark: 20 Paranormal Tales of Demons, Shifters, Werewolves, Vampires, Fae, Witches, Magics, Ghosts and More

by Rebecca Hamilton

  “It’s an attraction,” he said, then shook his head rapidly at her raised eyebrows. “Not like that.”

  But she saw a face with cool brown eyes, framed by honey-golden hair and an aura of someone else’s adoration, and she strongly suspected that it could be like that, if only sometimes. She kept her mouth shut, for the moment, and tried to focus on his words instead of his thoughts.

  “Someone d-described it as a knowledge,” he continued. “Like instinct. That I can be trusted. Wouldn’t hurt. Or judge, I g-guess. Am here to help.”

  “If you can make them trust you, why did Duran think you needed taking down a notch?”

  He shuddered hard, and Kim caught a glimpse of darkness and cement and a kind of organized chaos, the echo of a third mind crashing their little telepathy party. There was a pattern in it, something familiar, something she had felt very recently, and she had nearly sussed it out when the glimpse was gone again.

  “I don’t make them,” Lenny muttered to the floor. “They just know, but Seba-… But he knows himself. He knows he d-doesn’t trust anyone, ever, so when he realized… He thought it was something I was d-doing to him, something he had to fight. He was afraid.”

  He looked up, straight at Kim, and his eyes were wide and filled with panic. “They’ll kill him. Please don’t let them k-kill him. He’s just afraid, that’s all. So afraid. It’s not his fault.” He clutched at her hands, pleading, but she slid away. Sweet or not, nonviolent or not, she doubted that panic really belonged to him.

  She turned to Ainslie instead. They exchanged a significant glance, and Ainslie shrugged, the contents of her multitudinous pockets rattling.

  “What do you think?” Kim asked. “Danger to society?”

  Ainslie snorted. Her Einstein-hair swayed.

  “Danger to me?”

  Ainslie’s mouth twitched. “Eh.”

  Kim nodded. “Then I think we’re good, here. Could you go find that name I gave you?”

  “And leave you here with the vamedium?”

  “Just until you can dig up a phone number and-or an address. Because you know, without, he’ll be staying here indefinitely.”

  That got Ainslie moving. “Nothing personal,” she told Lenny, but she snatched up a huge canvas satchel and marched out the door. Kim locked it behind her.

  “Gonna send you home,” she told Lenny. “Or try, anyway. Circumstances permitting.”

  She crossed in front of him and went to the kitchen, looking back only once to find he had not moved. The mugs clattered, and the microwave whirred, and she made intensiTEA. The man in the other room said nothing. Kim concentrated, trying to see if she could catch his thoughts, but he seemed to be keeping them to himself. She decided he probably didn’t mean to share them at all. He might not even have known he was doing it. If his feelings were in her head, it was only because Sebastian Duran had demolished all of Lenny’s mental walls.

  She sugared her tea and returned.

  “What about Vickie?” she asked.

  He looked at her blankly.

  “Why do you think you lost control of… it?”

  “Don’t know. He wouldn’t let me… for so long. Maybe I c-can’t, anymore.”

  “Can’t what, exactly?”

  “Maybe I’m not a medium.” There was something hollow and detached in that statement. It reminded Kim of the way he had been before, when he was nothing but a thrall. She sat down beside him and hit his knee hard with hers. He startled.

  “The absolute last thing I need,” she told him, as gently as she could, “is a vampire in the middle of an existential crisis. Maybe you’re just out of practice. Did you think of that? Now, what’s the matter with Vickie that you think she needs help?”

  “Not for me to tell you.”

  “Does it have something to do with the way she died?”

  He frowned at her and opened his mouth, but she cut in.

  “I moved in a couple years after, but everyone in the building knows the story. It was a brand new building at the time. She’s the only ghost so far. Well, she was the only death so far.”

  He thought about that for a second, focused so hard that he almost seemed to forget that he was a wreck.

  “How does the story say it happened?” he asked.

  “She was living here, this apartment, by herself. Folks pretty well off, so she didn’t have to have a roommate. She kind of had a little bit of a reputation. Anyway, she had a party, invited maybe ten people over, everyone got smashed, and at about three in the morning, her boyfriend dumped the hell out of her and left. She made everyone get out, and at about three hours later, the truck came around to pick up the garbage from the dumpsters outside, and the guys found her hanging out the kitchen window with a bed sheet around her neck. The boyfriend tried to drown his sorrows, gave himself alcohol poisoning, and wound up in rehab somewhere. It kind of peters out at that point.”

  “It wasn’t because of the b-boyfriend.”

  “I don’t know. Alcohol does some crazy things to people… How do you know, anyway?”

  “I always know.”

  “How people died?”

  “No. Just what I have to know to fix the problem.”

  “And what’s the problem?”

  The door slammed. Kim’s heart leapt into overdrive, and she sprang to her feet, yanking her pistol out of her waistband. It took her a few moments to realize that the door had never opened, and a closed door cannot slam. A moment longer, and she realized that she hadn’t heard anything at all, at least not with her ears.

  Something like a shadow stood pressed against the door. It gradually solidified into a freckled white body clad in cutoff shorts and a brilliant blue tank top, its bleached blonde hair tied up in a ponytail. It kicked the door, and the thud bypassed the air to register in Kim’s brain.

  “The problem is that she doesn’t know she killed herself. She thinks it was an accident. Watch.”

  “What are you doing?”

  “Showing you.”

  There was a strange resonance in his voice, calmness and surety that struck a weird discord with the way he had been a moment before. His stutter had disappeared. Kim looked down at Lenny. He hadn’t gotten up, hadn’t even moved much. His eyes did not reflect the light.

  “Conscious access to memory is a unique trait of living things, but memory itself is not. It’s encoded in the minute vibrations between elementary particles. Our entire universe is built of information given shape. Part of that is its history. Its memory. Now watch.”

  The memory of Vickie moved away from the door, paused in the middle of the room to mutter curses, and crossed to the kitchen. As it moved, the history seemed to move with it. Kim caught glimpses of unfamiliar furniture, the corner of a table, the arm of a chair, that appeared as the memory neared and disappeared again as it moved away. The shadow-Vickie opened a shadow-refrigerator and pulled out a shadow-beer.

  “She turned twenty-one like, seriously just a couple of weeks before,” she whispered, as though afraid the memory would hear her.

  Shadow-Vickie chugged the beer – downright chugged it – and opened another. She paced aimlessly for a few minutes, then flopped onto her stomach on the floor and picked up a remote control to turn on a television outside the little sphere of history. She rolled onto her side, stretching out one arm to pull something off of an invisible table. A pile of mail appeared beneath her fingertips and spilled onto the floor. She pawed through it, separated it into stacks, and went to get herself another beer. Her freckles stood out against flaming scarlet cheeks.

  “This is after the party,” Kim whispered. “You’re showing me… the universe’s memory of what happened after she was alone.”

  Lenny nodded.

  “God, how many did she have before you… you tuned in?”

  “A lot.”

  Shadow-Vickie teetered into the wall and tripped over the carpet as she came stumbling back. Her eyes were glassy. “Wasunna dumpiz face ninnyway,” she mumbled. She s
at on the remote by accident and jumped as the channel changed to something unbearably loud. She fumbled with it until it turned off again.

  “This is when she realized.”

  The memory was pawing through the mail again, just a pile of official envelopes. Kim spotted a couple of credit card bills and something from the university.

  “Realized what?”

  “She wasted three years following some boy around, and came out with nothing to show for it. It wasn’t because he dumped her. It was because she didn’t dump him first.”

  Kim craned her neck to read the header of the paper in shadow-Vickie’s hands. She caught the words deeply regret and scholastic dismissal. Then the paper was a wad in shadow-Vickie’s fist, and it vanished as she threw it at the wall.

  “She wanted to be a lawyer.”

  Shadow-Vickie knocked back half of her beer. Then she upended the bottle and watched with an expression of grim fascination as the last of it fizzed into the carpet. A telephone came into being as she approached the wall, and she picked up the receiver, only to stare at it for a long minute and finally drop it to the floor. She nodded once, as though the dial tone confirmed everything. Then she zombie-shuffled into the bedroom.

  “Stop,” Kim suddenly heard herself say. Her brain caught up with her mouth a split second later, and she understood that they were coming to the end. “Stop, I don’t want to see this part.”

  But shadow-Vickie zombie-shuffled back out of the bedroom, dragging a flowery pink sheet behind her. “I’m makin’ my escape,” she sang tunelessly. “Gonna get out, gonna break out, gonna make my escape.”

  Slowly and methodically, she cut the sheet down the middle and tied the halves together. She tried to tie one end to the handle of the oven, but it slid off, so she slid it underneath the handle and tied it back on itself over and over until the knot was big enough to catch.

  “Lenny!” Kim hissed. “Leonard, quit it!”

  He was watching the carpet with his oddly dull eyes, paying no obvious attention to the suicide going on in the kitchen. Kim focused on him, on his eyes and the way the shadows seemed to play across their lenses, the way he seemed to be looking through some kind of screen, a tiny veil.

  The sheet pulled taut with a bass twang. The cotton fibers creaked. Kim swallowed the acid that was creeping up her throat.

  “Why would you,” she started, and stopped. “Why did you even show me that? You said it was none of my business!”

  “I wasn’t showing you,” he said softly. He looked over Kim’s shoulder. The shadows in his eyes lightened, and Kim knew that if she checked the kitchen, the sheet would be gone.

  She turned around instead. At first, she saw nothing, but the ghost gradually became visible. It was strange, seeing her washed-out and pale so soon after seeing her in full color for the first time.

  “I don’t see why I should assume any of that was real.” Vickie’s ponytail snapped and swirled in an invisible gale. “It was a stupid accident. I was drunk. Drunk people do stupid things. I was climbing down a sheet like they do in the movies. I got tangled. I didn’t kill myself.”

  But her voice wavered. Lenny got up and held out a hand. Vickie nodded wordlessly and took it. There was a flash of dark, and the room went deathly cold, and the ghost was gone.

  Chapter 12

  THE TEMPERATURE GRADUALLY returned to normal. Lenny held very still, head slightly tilted, as though listening.

  Kim listened too, but heard nothing.

  “Did she go?” she asked after a moment of silence.

  He nodded, but his face was tight.

  “Did you make her?”

  “Can’t. I just let her.”

  “Well.” Kim stepped to where the ghost had been a moment before and put out a hand. The air was still chilly, and the feeling of cold went deeper than her skin. “That was… Was that easy?”

  He looked at her with polite disbelief.

  “Yeah, okay, not easy. But at least you know that you still can. You didn’t lose it, after all.”

  He nodded and passed his hand over his eyes, sinking down slowly to sit on the carpet.

  “It’s okay. I’m… I’m still me.”

  “You’re still you, honey. He can do a lot of crap to people, but I don’t think even he can take that away.” She touched his head lightly and felt him sag.

  “T-tired,” he muttered.

  “Yeah, ditto. You should try to get some sleep. You’re not going to, ah, wig out on me again, are you?”

  “I’ll t-try not to.”

  She sighed. That was hardly a guarantee, and with Ainslie gone and Bernice out of contact, she didn’t dare leave him alone while she slept herself. There was no telling where he might wander off to.

  “You take over the bed for a bit,” she told him. “I’m going to watch some T.V.” And drink some more tea, and a lot of coffee.

  She helped him up, got him into the bed, and threw the electric blanket over the top of him. As the heat built, his face relaxed, and his breathing slowed. But when she tried to tiptoe away, he sat up, wild-eyed.

  “Please,” he begged, “please, I d-don’t want to dream. C-can’t you… Isn’t there some k-kind of magic…?”

  Kim bit her lip and shook her head. “I don’t know, honey. That’s not my area. And if there was, I really, really wouldn’t want to mess with your head. I’m so sorry.”

  She slipped out, leaving the door ajar, and turned the television on. It was only for background noise, though; she intended to read. Ainslie’s growing index was vast, but so was the tiny fraction of it residing in Kim’s apartment. She dug through her pile of note cards and sorted out the ones that interested her: spirits, vampires, other worlds, and the things that might possibly connect them.

  Spirits.

  Vickie had never been a friend, exactly, but she had been a fixture, a constant. The apartment felt strange without her. Kim doubted she would miss the sarcasm or the early-morning ghostly noises, but she already knew that she would notice their absence. She had never really thought of herself living alone.

  The card on the top of the pile led her to the writings of a modern mystic. She paged through the volume absently, letting her eyes scan the pages for useful tidbits while her mind was otherwise engaged.

  Vampires.

  Leonard Hugo had claimed not to know anything about the Broken, the Uszkodzone, but that didn’t necessarily mean that he wasn’t one. Ainslie was right about some things not mixing well. There was no telling what kind of effect vampirism could have on a medium. There was no telling what effect ten years dry could have on a vampire, either. It might be that he would never recover. She wondered what kind of man he had been before.

  The mystic was a dud, so she pulled out the next book in the stack.

  Other worlds.

  That topic skewed theological, Kim knew, and she had to admit that her own theology was more than a little bit rusty. She had to separate what she believed from what she could observe, and that was difficult. She had observed the watery effect Lenny had brought down in her bedroom when he touched on the Veil, the barrier between this world and the strange sort of limbo where some spirits got stuck on their way to Wherever they were ultimately going. She believed that there was a heaven and a hell somewhere on the other side, but she could not offer tangible proof of that. Vickie had been stuck, but now she was gone. Leonard Hugo had done that.

  A spirit, a vampire, and the Veil between worlds.

  At almost ten o’clock, she either heard a noise or simply felt her guest panic, and it didn’t seem important which, so she shut her book and went to intercept him before he could make it out of the bedroom.

  “You said you’d try not to flip out,” she reminded him, taking him carefully by the arm and sitting him back down on the bed.

  He nodded.

  “You okay?”

  He nodded again.

  “Bad dream?”

  His frown was visible in the light from the other room. “Dunn
o. I didn’t know where I was. Thought I… Thought I was somewhere else.”

  “Where did you think you were?”

  “Home. B-but then I wasn’t.”

  She gave his arm a gentle squeeze. The electric blanket had left him warm, but he was cooling fast. “Soon,” she promised. “You think you can get back to sleep?”

  He nodded, but when she tried to get up to return to her reading, he held her back.

  “C-could… could you stay? Just… just here? In the room?”

  She hesitated, but he wanted her to stay, and she felt it, and separating his wants from hers was nearly impossible. It was in her blood, not so much a command as a plea, and fighting it off seemed cruel, under the circumstances.

  “If you don’t mind having the light on,” she conceded. “I’m going to go get my book. Be right back.” She peeled his fingers back from around her wrist, clicked the lamp on, and retreated to the living room. He sat still and silent until she returned, staring tensely into the shadows of the closet. Even when she piled pillows against the headboard and settled back with her book, he stared. Nothing moved, and she left him alone, and eventually he wadded himself up under the electric blanket.

  Around eleven o’clock, she got up to make more intensiTEA and realized that he was still staring out from beneath the folds of the blanket. She shut the closet.

  “He’s not in there,” she told him. “He’s far away, and there’s a huge team making damn sure he doesn’t get anywhere near you or me. Right now, right here, you are safe. A hundred percent, okay? That’s my oath or whatever. Please try to get some rest. Is there anything I can do to help?”

  He squeezed his eyes shut and drew the blanket up over his face.

  Kim squeezed her eyes shut too, out of pure frustration. It wasn’t his fault – none of it was his fault – but she was deeply ill-equipped to deal with shattered men. She abandoned her quest for tea, slid back into the bed, and switched off the light.

  “Okay, look,” she told him. “I don’t need you to be okay right now. I understand that will take time. But you have to understand that you’re safe. I’ve got you, sweetheart, and I won’t let anything get you, not ever. You don’t need to hide. You don’t need to brace yourself. Maybe you’re not okay now, but I believe you’re going to be, and I want to help get you there. Okay?”